Biting the Ballot

Regardless of how conscientious adults of today are to try to protect youngsters from exposure to examples of unsuitable public conduct, young children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren via TV and cellphone video readily encounter inappropriate behavior.

In this presidential election year, such is being exhibited by one of the two adults running to become head of the nation’s First Family, thus regularly appears Donald Trump.

In our local villages of earlier times, newspapers, magazines, newsreels, and radio broadcasts were the main source of what got mediated into our communities as out-of-town news, and meanwhile with our communities what was to be known of what was going on was spread by word of mouth in terms of what got first said, and then rumored around — minus such things that surely never happened out behind the barn or up in the haymow. This locally spread news eventually got set straight based upon who said what to whom and who could be counted on to tell it straight in place of the one or two who only by accident ever said anything anyone could count on.

The litmus test being,“who said that and from whom did you hear it” — the response in assessment being a tentatively accepting “hum” or a rejecting “HUMPH.” The initial reaction of interest or skepticism coming in large part in light of the old parental saw that contended the reputation you earn and keep comes of what you do, the words you speak, and the company you willingly keep.

Via the World Wide Web, we have now been moved into a global village (over a half of a century more “civilized” than when first explored by Marshall McLuhan).

In our new digital digs you don’t know who is saying what or even who said it. But from what is said, half said, and unsaid, most of us have come to realize that we cannot believe everything that goes around and comes around in cyberspace.

And thus Trump and Hillary Clinton both make it easy to “Hump” anything that comes from either of them. However, the disgusting vitriolic nature of Trump’s effusions makes it easy to most reject anything he has to say.

If one can or cannot bite the ballot to vote for either one of these two, the hum-and-humph reaction will have come of a shared tendency made note of by one of the founders of social psychology, Gustav Le Bon, in his incipient 1895 book on propaganda The Crowd: Study of the Popular Mind. Le Bon wrote: “people believe what they want to believe.”    Today, many miles down that old road that still comes of that same start, for the sake of our nation’s children members of our society better hope that only a dismally minded few will “want to believe” that Trump should be set by voted as the model for the way our children speak and treat others. But surely the bulk of moms and pops will be more PC, and that means PARENTALLY CORRECT and decline to vote for Trump.

As for Clinton, that maybe be too tough of a vote for some to stomach — would such a vote be for the lesser of two evils or the evil of two lessers? Clinton supporters can tell us that such is not the case and that Hillary is clearly one of the best of the all-time best. That may be what they want to believe, some of us do not. Do we have a better answer?

Probably not a successful one, and que sera sera.

—Sam Osborne